This blog is primarily a personal outlet for questioning, wondering and reflecting on the often mystical, deeply heart-centered and life affirming work with older adults and memory care. I hope to draw or even point to a window and invite others to look through it and share their own profound encounters with our world’s sacred sages. There is life to be lived here, even in the midst of serious illness and loss. It is our gift and our purpose to explore what it means to be human, to create and then share what we see. My teachers, the Wisdom Keepers, encourage us to not spend it in fear, but instead choose to turn towards what scares us the most and explore what lives beyond it. It is this loving act of kindness towards ourselves which then opens the door towards seeing the light in everyone.
I have learned and gained more from elders living with memory loss than I will ever be able to give back in this lifetime. I work to consciously and intentionally remain open to the lessons I receive from each person I have had the privilege to know living with a dementia. These lessons are now a foundation for my meditative practice. My experiences with elders remain a source of great personal inspiration and continue to impact my life in a myriad of ways: shaping my decisions, actions, outlook and perception. This is why I call them “The Wisdom Keepers”: they are our earth bound sages with one foot in the plan of constructed reality and the other in a spiritual dimension we can only intuit. They are teaching all over the planet, can you hear them?
Clearer Than Memory 
Laura,
A lovely beginning. I have not always been able to articulate as well as you the lessons I’ve learned from my work in this area. But there is something about being present with people with memory loss over periods of time that recreates/reinvents one’s sense of time, life and death and the continuity of life lived. It can at times bring a sense of peace and wonder to life that most of us in this society are missing much of the time. I can only grasp it for very short periods of time.